| tags: blind, enabling technology
Maze Day is for visually impaired and blind students in grades K-12, their parents and teachers. Your students will enjoy fun and educational computer applications developed especially for them. UNC students will learn how well their accessible applications work with real users. And everyone will have a good time!
| tags: enabling technology, links
Pete sent these links inviting more participation in Gnome accessibility.
| tags: motor impaired, programming, ideas, links, enabling technology
Wow! Pete sent me this pointer to Opengazer . I've wondered if this was possible but never found a student to work on it. Thanks to Piotr Zieliński for developing it and making it open source. We'll have great fun with this in accessible applications for people with impaired movement.
| tags: enabling technology, links
Steve pointed out a nice collection of accessibility videos on the YouTube abilitynet channel .
| tags: programming, enabling technology, links
I saw a story on slashdot about the simon speech recognition system available on SourceForge.net.
| tags: programming, enabling technology, wiimote
UPDATE: Tim Swast has updated this code to work with the new wiiuse API. I recommend his version which you can find here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/wiiuse/0.12
Several of my project teams this semester will (I hope) use PyGame and the Wiimote in their projects. I had it working fine on Ubuntu but struggled to find an interface that works with Python on Windows XP. Luke pointed me to wiiuse so I wrote a very simple wrapper with ctypes and then wrapped that in a module for PyGame. You can find the code in CVS at SourceForge in pywiiuse. I also uploaded a source release . You'll need wiiuse.dll on Windows or wiiuse.so on Ubuntu.
| tags: ideas, links, enabling technology
Neat ideas that could turned into accessible music fun.
| tags: enabling technology, links
Bogus! The guy is too fast so he can't play . We can't have these disabled people showing us up. The Olympics are just sad.
| tags: programming, enabling technology
We want to give away software for fun and learning and we want it to run on as many machines as possible. I think these are my minimum requirements.
| tags: enabling technology, programming, ideas, ubuntu
Our games and tools for kids with disabilities should run on whatever computer they have at the school (typically an old PC running some version of Windows or a Mac). One alternative to cross-platform testing might be a LiveCD that boots some OS (say Linux) and runs our software. Then our development environment is fixed and we're relying on the OS to cover over hardware differences. Pete and I spent a bit of time this last weekend trying our various LiveCDs to see how little memory they could be made to use.